The Micro Men and the Connected Kids

My past and my present collided in a happily nostalgic way his week. Firstly, I watched “Micro Men” on the telly. It was the tale of the rivalry between the two Cambridge-based home-computer giants of the early 1980s - Acorn and Sinclair. Geeks back then (of whom I was one) tended to wear their allegiances to each of those brands on their selves and I was an out-and-out Acorn man. Indeed, my first gig in the computing world was with a company that sold networking software and hard discs for the BBC Micro - the entire network operating system had to fit into less memory than the average logo on a website does now...

The real reminder was just how new computers were back then. When I first arrived at my secondary school, it owned one computer (an RML 380Z in case you care). You could book 15 minute sessions on it and write programs in a variety of languages, but frankly only a small number of us bothered. The computer lab didn’t appear until I was doing my o-levels and when I left there was still no such thing as computer studies - computers were only used to support teaching in maths and some science classes.

Fast-forward 25 years and I was at parent’s evening for my 4 year old. She’s been 4 for 3 months, and at school for 4 weeks. It is an ordinary village school (not some kind of NASA-sponsored academy) and I was told how she enjoyed ICT (that’s computers for the uninitiated). ICT! She’s 4! I was changing her nappies less than 20 months ago - now she’s being tought how to use Windows!

When she leaves school she’ll be computer literate in systems that now have not even been imagined. She will be familiar with, and probably own, devices that are networked she will communicate and collaborate with her friends and peers in ways that will probably have me harumphing about like a Luddite, bemoaning this “new-fangled technology”. Douglas Adams has a great quote about technology which I wholeheartedly endorse....

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

• Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
• Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it.
• Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

So what’s this got to do with the price of fish? Well, another timely collision into my week was reading in Saturday’s Guardian about the amount of time teenagers and young adults spend on social networking sites (stuff that will seem as dated as the ZX81 to my younger daughter when she’s 18). The generation emerging from education into the workplace thinks, communicates, collaborates in ways their forebears simply don’t. They’re emerging into a world in which economic uncertainty will encourage greater scrutiny of their purchases and brand loyalties than their parents (at least I bleedin’ hope so - otherwise, we will have learned nothing from the last 18 months). Being so at home in their connected world, they will be expecting to use the same tools to communicate with retailers and service providers and local authorities and educators as they do with their peers. That was the point of a paper I gave, together with Peter Carragher of the essentiagroup, at the CCF conference last month. We looked at the internet and communication usage of different age groups and discussed how this needs to impact the way we run customer contact in the very near future. It was good fun to research and put together, & I’d like to hear what others thing. If you’d like a copy of the material, drop me an email via contact@callmedia.co.uk or post a comment on this blog entry.

Although terrifyingly old fogyish and rather unfashionably the wrong side of Douglas Adam’s quote, the geek in me is fascinated by what will come next in the world of communication. Just as long as I’m not expected to use it....